Rugby (Warwickshire)

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rugby
Rugby Market Place
Rugby Market Place
Coordinates 52 ° 22 ′  N , 1 ° 16 ′  W Coordinates: 52 ° 22 ′  N , 1 ° 16 ′  W
Rugby (england)
rugby
rugby
Residents 62,790
administration
Post town RUGBY
ZIP code section CV21, CV22, CV23
prefix 01788
Part of the country England
region West Midlands
Shire county Warwickshire
District rugby
ONS code 44UD
British Parliament Rugby and Kenilworth
Website: rugby

Rugby is a town in the English county of Warwickshire on the River Avon . It has around 62,790 inhabitants (as of 2002) and is the administrative seat of the Borough of Rugby . The city is located 13 miles east of Coventry , near the border with Northamptonshire and Leicestershire and is known for the rugby school , where the sport named after it rugby is said to have been invented.

history

The first traces of settlement can be found from the Iron Age . A few kilometers south of today's rugby there was later the Roman settlement Tripontium . The original rugby was an Anglo-Saxon settlement and is mentioned in the Doomesday Book as Rocheberie . The market law was rugby in 1255 and developed soon after a regional trade center.

The school buildings of the Public School in Rugby

The Rugby School was in 1567 with the assets of Lawrence Sheriff founded one born in Rugby London merchant who decreed the construction of a school for boys from Rugby in his will. Over the years the school became a private institution, so in 1878 the Lawrence Sheriff School was established to fulfill the original mandate.

Rugby remained a small provincial town until the 19th century, until the London and Birmingham Railway was built in 1838 and connected with the Midland Counties Railway in Rugby in 1840 . This made the city a major railroad hub, which Charles Dickens chose as the backdrop for his short story Mugby Junction , written in 1866 . The growing number of railroad workshops and factories drew large numbers of workers to the city and within fifty years the population grew from 2,500 in 1835 to over 10,000 in the 1880s.

In the 1890s and 1900s more and more businesses settled in and rugby became one of the industrial centers in the Midlands. By 1940 the city had grown to over 40,000 inhabitants.

present

Today's rugby is a merger of the original rugby and the towns of Bilton , Hillmorton , Brownsover and Newbold-on-Avon , which were integrated in 1932 when rugby was given the status of a municipal borough . This form of administrative unit was repealed in 1972 by the Local Government Act .

Most of the buildings in the city center date from the Victorian period and the early 20th century, although older structures can also be found. Many buildings, including the Rugby School and St. Andrew Church , were designed by the architect William Butterfield .

The city center has numerous restaurants and pubs, as well as two night clubs. The Brownsover Fish Bar was voted the best fish and chip shop in England in 2002. According to the Guinness Book of Records , downtown rugby in England is said to have the greatest density of pubs per square mile.

traffic

Rugby is close to the highway (engl. = Motorway ) M1 , M6 and M45 , as well as on the roads A45, A428 and A426. The city is a rail hub on the West Coast Main Line railway line and has direct links to London , Birmingham and the north-west of England.

The Oxford Canal , which has linked Oxford to Coventry and the Midlands since 1790 , runs along the northern outskirts of Rugby. During the industrial revolution, it was one of the first efficient transport routes for the transport of goods and people. Today the canal, which has not been modernized since then, is only used for recreational shipping with narrowboats .

economy

Rugby's economy consists mainly of industrial manufacturing and development operations. There is a long tradition in the manufacture of gas and steam turbines at the General Electric Company (GEC) and the Associated Electrical Industries (AEI), which emerged from British Thomson-Houston and were the main employers for many years. Both companies have now merged to form Alstom , whose Converteam offshoot acquired by GE Energy employs around 700 people at two locations in Rugby.

A further important industry is the production of cement in a large factory on the western edge of which during the Lias resulting Jura - lime is obtained the immediate vicinity. Cement production began in the 1860s. After a large factory in nearby Southam was closed, the factory in Rugby was expanded considerably and it is now one of the largest in Europe.

Although a little further away, Rolls-Royce is one of the most important employers in the village of Ansty , whose economic factor also plays a role in rugby.

Another important branch of the economy is tourism, especially in connection with rugby.

politics

Rugby falls under two different administrations: Rugby Borough Council , which covers the city and the surrounding area, and Warwickshire County Council , the administration for the entire county of Warwickshire, in which rugby is located. The city itself does not have the status of its own municipality ( unparished ) and therefore has no politically independent administration.

Since 1983, rugby has been part of the Rugby and Kenilworth constituency , which is one of the districts with the narrowest majorities in general elections in the Midlands region. Between 1983 and 1997, the conservative politician Jim Pawsey was elected to the British House of Commons and then replaced by Andy King of the Labor Party .

In the 2005 election , the parliamentary seat of Jeremy Wright was regained for the Conservatives.

Town twinning

Sports

Rugby has a football team, Rugby Town FC (formerly VS Rugby ), which plays in the Southern League . Unsurprisingly, rugby has a large number of rugby clubs, the most famous of which are the Newbold Rugby Lions and the Old Laurentian RFC .

Attractions

Historical

  • St. Andrew's Church , the parish church built in the 13th century . It was rebuilt and expanded in the 19th century according to extensive plans by the architect William Butterfield . It received a second 55 meter high church tower on the east side. Despite the extensive renovation, many parts of the medieval building were preserved, such as the 22-meter-high west tower, which is reminiscent of a fortified tower in its style. This west tower was probably built at the time of Heinrich III. (1216–1272) built to fulfill both sacred and military functions and is Rugby's oldest surviving structure. Other historical objects have been preserved in the church, including a 13th century chest and a medieval baptismal font .
  • The Catholic Church of St. Mary on Dunchurch Road is one of the dominant structures in the city with its tall, slender tower. It was built in 1872 in the Early English style.
  • In the city center stands the statue of the poet Rupert Brooke , who was born in Rugby and is best known for his two "war sonnets" Peace and The Soldier .
  • Rugby School is the setting of the novel Tom Brown's Schooldays , published in 1857 and filmed several times (most recently in 2004 with Stephen Fry ), and which is regarded as a leading example of the genre of English school stories . A statue in front of the Rugby School shows the author of this book, Thomas Hughes , who attended the school from 1834 to 1842. Other well-known rugby school students included poets Rupert Brooke, Lewis Carroll , author of Alice in Wonderland , poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold , former Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain, and writer Salman Rushdie
William Webb Ellis statue

Landscape

particularities

In addition to historic buildings, museums and scenic attractions, Rugby is also known for two other eye-catching structures that have achieved a certain fame.

Longest wave transmission system

From 1950 to 2007, Rugby, a large long- wave and long-wave transmitter operated by British Telecom, existed near Rugby . It served to spread the MSF time signal .

Until April 1, 2003, the station with the GBR callsign also worked there . The GBR transmitter went into operation on January 1, 1926 and was originally used for telegraphic communications with the British colonies . From the 1950s, this transmitter, operated on the frequency 16 kHz, was used to transmit messages to submerged submarines. As a curiosity it should be mentioned that the callsign of GBR Rugby was also immortalized on some records that were recorded in Central England. For example, the callsign of GBR can be identified in Morse code on the long-playing records of Tubular Bells by Mike Oldfield with the help of a spectral analysis program.

On April 1, 2003, the GBR transmitter was shut down after the British Navy terminated its contract for the operation of long-wave transmitters at BT and a new contract with Merlin Broadcasting .

From 1926 to 2004 the antenna system consisted of a wire antenna that was suspended from twelve braced steel truss masts that were 250 meters high and insulated from earth. Due to the discontinuation of operations by GBR, eight of these masts became dispensable and were torn down on the night of June 19-20, 2004 after the blasting was delayed by rabbits who had gnawed the ignition cables.

Cement plant

Another prominent point is the cement factory in the west of the city, which can be seen from a great distance and is therefore a landmark for many travelers in the rugby landscape. This “attraction” is not without controversy and was voted one of the top 10 most unpopular buildings in England in a survey by the television station Channel 4 . The factory's emissions are blamed for public health problems and operator Cemex was fined £ 400,000 for pollution at the instigation of the Environment Agency in October 2006 .

Others

Jet engine

In April 1937, Frank Whittle built the first prototype of a jet engine at British Thomson-Houston in Rugby and successfully continued work on it in nearby Lutterworth.

holography

The Hungarian engineer Dennis Gábor , who developed holography in 1947 and received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971, also worked for Thomson-Houston in rugby .

rugby

Rugby is best known for the "invention" of the sport of the same name. Legend has it that rugby was created during a football game in 1823, when the player William Webb Ellis , in disregard of the applicable rules, tucked the ball under his arm and carried it into the opponent's goal.

Personalities

Known People Born In Rugby:

Remarks

  1. ↑ 2001 urban areas headcounts
  2. ↑ Mugby Junction as a free e-book from Project Gutenberg
  3. ^ Rugby local history group
  4. ^ Rugby local history group
  5. ↑ Fish & Chip Shop of the Year Competition ( Memento of the original from July 22, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.seafish.org
  6. ↑ Rugby BC Action on Tourism ( Memento of the original from September 29, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.rugby.gov.uk
  7. ↑ Malcolm Hancock: The Official History of Rugby Radio Station at: subbrit.org.uk, January 2002, accessed March 9, 2018.
  8. ↑ Classic Album width a Hidden Code . From: coventrytelegraph.net July 10, 2007, accessed March 9, 2018.
  9. ↑ BBC News June 20, 2004. Rabbits delay masts demolition
  10. ↑ C3 Demolition
  11. ↑ EA Court Case details ( Memento of the original from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.environment-agency.gov.uk
  12. ^ The Papers of Sir Frank Whittle
  13. ^ Nobel Foundation, biography Dennis Gábor

Web links

Commons : Rugby, Warwickshire  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files